What is worth preserving?

Most of the shirts at the exhibition are from the collections of three Estonian memory institutions. From the perspective of art and design, T-shirts are often worthless. Shirts have not reached the collections of history museums for aesthetic reasons, but rather for political or social considerations. Collecting modern material culture is a challenging task, because it usually becomes clear only in retrospect whether or not an object is an important cultural marker or a strange curiosity. To illustrate the complex nature of collecting and the inevitable randomness that it entails, we have displayed a few shirts whose meaning has been forgotten, or is yet to be rediscovered.